'Dragging waste classification into the 21st Century', Tuesday 20th March 2012
The waste regulations put the responsibility for classifying waste as either hazardous or non hazardous on the shoulders of the waste producer. However, approximately 80% of waste classifications are actually done by the waste receivers themselves as most waste producers do not have the resources or time. For mirror entry type waste streams such as soils, receivers accept the chemistry results tabulated on faxes, emails and in pdf documents along with copies of site plans and other supporting material. The resource required by a receiver to manually enter all these chemistry results is prohibitive so most assessments are made by scanning the chemistry results and looking for obvious outliers. This "experience" based approach has to be conservative and also explains why producers can get two different classifications for the same analysis. Where calculations are carried out (by producers, receivers, agents, consultants, hauliers and the EA), most are done through either thousands of custom made spreadsheets, via a spreadsheet-to-web based service (waste soils/EWC chapter 17 only) or manually on paper. There is little or no audit trial, poor transparency and room for error.
Ian Bishop of Haswaste Online will discuss how the use of proprietary online software can assist waste producers, for example geo-environmental consultants and contractors, civil engineers and developers classify mirror entry wastes.
Refreshments will be available from 6.00 p.m. followed by the evening lecture which will commence at 6.30 p.m. The event is open to non-fellows, so please feel free to invite your colleagues or friends. The venue is the University of Bristol Earth Sciences Department, room G25. We look forward to seeing you.
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